With cloud computing services likely to mature significantly over the next five years, hardware giant Intel and business software firm SAP have launched a new collaborative venture to examine opportunities in this area.

The launch was announced at Belfast’s Titanic Quarter business and science park last week.

Called a "co-lab", the collaboration is housed in a building yards from the dock that saw the ill-fated Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage.

The collaboration will investigate practical and business aspects of cloud computing such as power saving, virtualisation, and the provision of business services similar to those aimed at consumers by Twitter and Google.

Intel will look at hardware and the cloud

The Intel side of the co-lab will focus on the hardware needed for cloud computing infrastructures, while SAP will look at how to engineer its software to move to a cloud computing platform. However, both companies won't be engineering discrete systems, the solutions they come up with, "will need to be end-to-end customer-focused ones," said SAP global head of research Lutz Heuser

Intel Labs Europe director Martin Curley, who instigated the closer collaboration, said: "After deciding that the co-lab would be a good idea, we outlined a number of hot topics that were of interest to both companies - areas that would benefit both companies if we pooled our resources."

Intel chief technology officer and head of Intel labs Justin Rattner agreed that collaboration was important: "We think of the co-lab as a new way of doing research," he said. "It’s clear that no one company can expect to do all the heavy lifting necessary to move new technology into the market place, and it’s only through such partnerships that we can accelerate innovation."

Rattner said it was important to recognise that consumer cloud services are difficult to conduct research on. To enable this, Intel has created a separate infrastructure.

"This allows research firms to trial computing services in a secure and harmless way. This is an acknowledgment that enterprises need access to a universal test bed," he said.

Rattner also addressed the environmental side of cloud computing.

"It’s no accident that these datacentres have sprung up in areas with cooler climates - it’s a way to avoid using large amounts of power to cool their infrastructures," he said.

Rattner cites Google and Microsoft's datacentres as examples - both are situated on the Columbia river in the US.

"You pass Google’s datacentre and then further north you pass Microsoft’s datacentre. A large river with a high water flow is a very convenient cooling mechanism," he said.

Rattner pointed out that the physical hardware of cloud infrastructures uses only a small part of the energy required - in the order of two per cent.

He said: "So even though we can have a big impact on the amount of power that the electronics is consuming, it turns out there are other factors that were historically beyond our control - we will be examining these in the co-lab."

These factors include an incremental cost per server for distributing power around the datacentre; providing an uninterruptible power supply for electricity supply glitches; and cooling fans for removing heat from the datacentre.

Rattner explained there were ways to minimise these losses with a total systems approach to energy reduction: "This is just one of the areas we’ll be looking at."

SAP to focus on software in the cloud

Heuser said SAP's focus would include " projects that focus on supporting virtualisation technology using SAP applications. It will be important to see how you can manage your datacentre in a different way".

Heuser said the major technology for the next decade would be internet services. He said that although consumer-based services from the likes of Google and Twitter have been successful, these have not arrived yet for enterprises.

"We hope that our joint research with Intel will allow us to deliver such services to enterprises within the next five years," he said.

Heuser said he was looking forward to the internet of the future.

"We will see convergence mature to the the extent that we can put core business services on the web," he said.